From May 20, 1993
3 Likes
Interesting. I didn’t know audio CD recorders showed up that early!
In 1994 I worked at a company called Codim where we made CD-i productions. While we developed, we would use an emulator, which was a special computer connected to a professional CD-i player, that emulated a disc from an image file. The emulator had a 1GB hard disk (very big for the standards of those days) and software to create the disc image file from other files that were on a Sun server on the (10 megabits per second) network. We had three emulators and pro CD-i players, and one of those emulators was also attached to a Philips CDD-521 CD recorder. The CDD-521 was probably the size of the recorder in that picture but had no controls except “Eject” and “Power”.
In those days, 74 minute discs were available and the price had come down to about $20 per disc, about the same as a prerecorded audio disc. It took me quite a while before I discovered that I could use an MS-DOS program to digitally grab audio tracks from an audio CD (and I remember being very excited about that), and take my PC to work and use the recorder to create my own audio discs. It took about 3 more years (1997) before CD recorders for computers came down in price enough to be affordable for enthusiasts.
===Jac
2 Likes
November 5, 1993 article about the survival of DCC it’s Competitor.
(I say it’s surviving better now more than ever!)
2 Likes
From May 19, 1993: I think they got the phonograph and cylinder mixed up in their timeline. And as for 2001 an iPod would easily go there.
1 Like
Two March 14, 1993 articles: one critical article about DCC and confused and overwhelmed store owners!
Great articles to read. Thanks for sharing and adding
From the RS-DC8 review:
When the Digital Compact Cassette format was first introduced, its designers said that only prerecorded DCC tapes would carry text information – user-recorded tapes would not. The idea was to increase the perceived value of prerecorded tapes, and it pleased record companies, but not consumers. In light of the fact that both prerecorded and user-recorded MiniDiscs can hold text, the DCC designers have recently changed their mind. Thus, the RS-DC8 can be used to encode as many as four text messages per track on user-recorded tapes, with up to forty characters per message.
Interesting.
We know that there were plans to implement a Table Of Contents at the beginning of a tape (there is a service note about the DCC900 that says they ran out of space in the ROM but there’s still an error message that says “NO TOC”). I didn’t know that the 3rd generation text feature was added because they were under pressure from consumers and the MiniDisc.
My opinion in the 1990s was that the title programming feature was a must-have. I didn’t buy the DCC900 because I couldn’t afford it and I thought it was ugly compared to some other recorders I had seen at the Firato in Amsterdam in 1992; I really liked the portrait-mode recorder I had seen, probably at Grundig (DCC305). When the second-generation recorders came out in 1993, I could afford them but didn’t want to buy one because it still didn’t have text programming. I eventually bought a DCC730 in 1994 but I didn’t like how the text editing was implemented (you couldn’t even enter an apostrophe? What?) and I didn’t like that it didn’t have more buttons and a VU meter.
===Jac
1 Like
